What If You Could Give Your CCTV Superpowers?

For most businesses, CCTV has traditionally had one fundamental limitation.

You need to know what you're looking for.

Something happens. A transaction doesn't look right. Stock goes missing. A discrepancy appears. Then somebody starts searching through CCTV footage trying to establish what happened.

At the Usee Industrial Design Lab, we've been working on a different approach.

What if the CCTV system already knew which transactions deserved your attention?

And what if it could bring the till transaction, associated video and intelligent analytics together in one simple interface?

That's the thinking behind a new software platform being developed by Usee.ie using Verkada camera technology and till transaction data.

Turning Till Transactions Into Video Intelligence

Modern retail and hospitality businesses can generate thousands of till transactions.

Most are completely legitimate.

The challenge for loss-prevention teams isn't collecting more information. It's finding the small number of events within all that data that warrant closer investigation.

Our software monitors defined transaction types including:

No Charge • Void • Refund • No Sale • Discount

Rather than presenting users with another enormous stream of information, the Usee dashboard turns those transactions into exceptions that can be investigated.

When an event is identified, the operator can quickly access the associated video evidence.

That changes the investigation from:

“Let's search through the CCTV and see what happened.”

to:

“Here's the transaction. Show me what happened.”

That's a significant difference.

Where Verkada Video Intelligence Makes It Really Interesting

Connecting CCTV footage with till data is only part of what we're exploring.

Verkada cameras provide advanced search and video intelligence capabilities.

Combining those capabilities with transactional information opens the possibility of looking beyond an individual refund, void or no-sale transaction.

The more interesting question becomes:

Is there a pattern?

A single unusual transaction may have a perfectly innocent explanation.

Repeated activity associated with particular circumstances, locations, times or behaviours may warrant further investigation.

The objective isn't for software to make accusations.

It's to give security and loss-prevention teams better information and dramatically reduce the amount of video they need to search manually.

CCTV + POS Data + Software

This represents something bigger about where we believe video surveillance is heading.

A camera gives us the picture.

The till gives us the transaction.

Analytics help us understand what's happening within the scene.

Software brings the information together.

That means CCTV can increasingly move from being simply a system used to investigate incidents after they occur towards becoming a source of useful operational intelligence.

We think that's an important change.

Making Sophisticated Technology Simple

There's another principle behind the project.

The intelligence can be complicated. The interface shouldn't be.

Our dashboard has deliberately been designed to make the important information immediately visible.

A manager can see today's exception summary, current watchlist, latest alert, venue activity and shift summary without having to understand what's happening technically behind the scenes.

When something needs attention, they can move directly from the transaction to the evidence.

That's ultimately what good security technology should do.

Not give people more information to process.

Help them find the information that matters.

Built in the Usee Industrial Design Lab

This project is also an example of why we created the Usee Industrial Design Lab in Dublin.

We're increasingly interested in what happens when different technologies are connected.

Cameras.

AI and video analytics.

Access control.

Sensors.

Business systems.

Transaction data.

And software developed around specific customer problems.

We don't necessarily need to build another camera.

There are already exceptional camera manufacturers doing that.

Our opportunity is to ask:

What else can we make the camera do?

That's where things become interesting.

And occasionally, it can feel a little like giving your CCTV superpowers.

We make sense of your video.

Usee.ie designs and develops intelligent video surveillance and security solutions for businesses across Ireland.